A Year in Reading: Stephen Elliott

Related Books:

I kind of hate to say this, but the very best book I read this year was Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It’s cliche, and he doesn’t need the boost. I read a number of smaller press books, some of which were excellent. Bluets by Maggie Nelson in particular springs to mind. But still, I really think Freedom is a masterpiece. I read it as an advance copy, so I had the fortune to read it when there was hype, but not as much hype as there became.

I will say this, it was not my best year for reading. It was a year where I read a lot of really good books but almost no great books. Last year I read three books I would consider better than Freedom, though only one of them was a novel, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. It took me six months to read 2666. In the meantime, I also read We Did Porn by Zak Smith, which was also a better book, as was Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. But that was last year, and that’s not what this is about.

But I don’t care. I want to talk about something else. You know what’s a great novel? Lush Life by Richard Price. That’s from my 2008 list (I keep a list of every book I read). Also, in 2008, I read the novella Ray by Barry Hannah. Are you kidding? You want to talk about great literature, you have to read Ray before you can even have the conversation. And those two books weren’t even the best books I read in 2008. Because in 2008, I read the absurdly underrated Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, which impacts the way I think about creative non-fiction still to this day.

My favorite book this year — at least it’s the one I’ve picked out of the stack beside my bed the most often — is Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (Blue Rider Press), a memoir of competitive swimming and a meditation on the swimming pool that defies any attempt to sum it up in a single line. I first read about it on the Paris Review Daily in the depths of February, when it seemed like swimming pool weather would never come; Shapton is an artist and an illustrator to go along with the equipoise of her prose style, and reading the book from night to night is like sitting on the stands at poolside and watching her swim the 4X100 meter medley of a life. The chapters are interspersed with portraits in watercolor, photographs of swimsuits on soft mannequin torsos, and abstract renderings of all the swimming pools that Shapton has known. “Ever present is the smell of chlorine,” Shapton writes of her childhood in Toronto, “and the drifting of snow in the dark.” The cover is even the color of poolwater in sunlight, with the darker silhouette of a swimmer’s bathing cap.

Richard Lange is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of stories Dead Boys. He lives in Los Angeles. Read more about him at www.richlange.comMy favorite book of the year was Fat City, by Leonard Gardner. It’s a novel about a couple of small-time boxers in Stockton, CA in the late ’50s. We follow these fighters as they train in ratty gyms, drink in skid row bars, chase women they don’t love, and work through their hangovers in dusty onion fields. Gardener finds harsh beauty in the bleakness and constructs sad poems out of broken dreams. These men want so much and get so little, and all of a sudden, BAM, you’re sitting there trying to read with tears in your eyes.Another book I liked was Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly’s dad has jumped bail on a meth charge, and it’s up to Ree to care for her two younger brothers and overmedicated mom. Her quest to track down her father before the bond company snatches the family’s house puts her in conflict with an unsavory branch of her extended clan and leads to some harrowing scrapes. You’ll shiver during Woodrell’s descriptions of the icy Ozarks, flinch at the sudden violence and come to love the indomitable Ree. It’s a simple tale made momentous by Woodrell’s quiet insistence that these poor folks and their hardscrabble lives deserve our respectful attention. I have to put in an Elmore Leonard, too, The Switch, from 1978. A kidnapping plot spins out of control in a shaky moral landscape where everybody’s guilty of something. I’m a fool for Leonard’s casual yet tightly controlled style and peerless dialogue. There’s also a lot of humor here, as he skewers the ’70s suburban country club lifestyle and makes sure that all the bad guys (and girls) get what’s coming to them.More from A Year in Reading 2007

One comment:

My wife, Shana, found the quote below. She is reading A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse (and liking it so far). We are in your nearly-70 demographic and sometimes we think we have no age cohorts here. Anyway a character (former literature major at the Sorbonne and now a police detective) says:

“I’m passionate about literature, and like anyone who’s passionate, I suffer. I expect a great deal from novels. I’ve been disappointed so often that over the last ten years or so I haven’t dared to open a new book. I wait for time to do the sorting. I only read classics now. …….”

I have asked my library to ILL the Barry Hannah novella; I love Nicholson Baker, too–he blew me away with his first book The Mezzanine and I have read everything by him. For the same reasons as others who are so conflicted about Freedom, I keep putting it off. Despite the raves. Maybe the quote above is the truest reason of all.

Last year my mother died. Often, my habit and love for reading felt unbearable and foreign. Other weeks it was reading alone that comforted me. It was all I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, because all I wanted was to live inside of sentences, stanzas, stories. I didn’t and couldn’t go out there, the world was glaring in its surface of sameness, but books were ultimately part of the company that drew me out of a space that was dangerous, expanding in its withdrawal and silence.

In 2015, I also had a book of my own published. And, honestly, it was difficult to navigate a space that suddenly felt inarticulate to me. Kind friends and kind strangers alike sent me specific titles regarding grief. I also consumed books where grief, loss, rebirth, and death were implicit, distilled, expanded into unbelievable landscapes I hadn’t seen or understood as clearly before, in the surreal afterlife of my mother’s absence.

One of the best books I read last year and have returned to more than once is Elizabeth Alexander’sThe Light of the World. The book left me speechless in its love, grace, and dignity. Reading that book gave me hope that I too could survive and celebrate life itself. Alexander’s book gave me hope and I picked up Tracy K. Smith’sOrdinary Light and Lacy M. Johnson’sThe Other Side. I also returned to Toi Derricotte’sThe Undertaker’s Daughter.

Being on the road on tour for my own book, I often filled my suitcase with more books than clothing. Everything I wore was mostly black so I didn’t think or care about clothes at all. But I cared about books and knew there were certain books I needed to have with me should I wake up, inconsolable, in a hotel room on the other side of the country. And so, many books crossed state lines, their spines shifting in mile-high altitudes and time zones. I wrangled slim volumes of poetry into my camera bag, which was stuffed with lenses, notebooks, and a watercolor set.

I began thinking of books and geography, literally and psychically. I considered how landscapes affected my mood and how, of course, a voracious grief devoured everything. Sometimes I’d get frustrated because I couldn’t remember names of favorites characters or the way those characters in those books had once made me feel, so I’d go back and reread them. And, in my travels, I often looked out for marvelous independent bookstores where I would then pick up more books, often shipping them back to Brooklyn when I realized I’d be charged at the airport for being over the weight restrictions.

While working on a photography project in Oxford, Miss., last summer I reread William Faulkner’sAs I Lay Dying and Eudora Welty’sOn Writing. I’d also carried around Lucille Clifton’sCollected Poems, edited by Kevin Young, because I was working on photographs about black women’s bodies, identities, and the presence and interruption of landscape in terms of blackness.

This journey made me pick up a second or third copy of Roger Reeves’sKing Me because I ended up driving down to Money, Miss., and further into the Delta. King Me made me go searching for Jean Toomer’sCane and Zora Neale Hurston’sDust Tracks on a Road. Hurston’s grace and excellence sent me back, gratefully, into the words of Henry Dumas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Hayden.

While I was in Portland, I caught up with Matthew Dickman but was so shy about meeting him I forgot to ask him to sign the hardcover of Mayakovsky’s Revolver I’d stashed in my rental car. And when I traveled down to Santa Fe to teach at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts), I dove again into Sherwin Bitsui’sFlood Song and read Jessica Jacobs’sPelvis with Distance because I was in Georgia O’Keeffe country. I’m still working through O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s letters, My Faraway One, and made some serious dents in it this year.

I’ve opened up Vladimir Nabokov’sLetters to Véra and placed those two near each other, like constellations, in my reading stack. Speaking of women artists, I reread the Diary of Frida Kahlo and Hayden Herrera’sbiography of Frida Kahlo because I curated the Poetry Society of America’s Poetry Walk for the New York Botanical Garden’s astonishing exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life.” Lucky for me, I got to spend lots and lots of time with the poetry of Octavio Paz, one of my favorites!

A dear friend just sent me a copy of Larry Levis’sThe Darkening Trapeze. Literally, I’ve been hiding out in my house to devour it in one sitting, which obviously led to a second sitting so I could read the entire book aloud. But I had to leave my house eventually, so Levis has been riding the subways with me. We’re great company for each other.

Reading Levis, of course, made me pick up Philip Levine’sWhat Work Is again and that somehow made me pull out W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and Jack Gilbert. When I journeyed to Vermont for the Brattleboro Festival, I cried at a moving tribute for Galway Kinnell and that made me buy another copy of The Book of Nightmares, which made me stay up all night in my hotel room reading aloud, remembering once how I’d been fortunate enough to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with Kinnell and so many other poets like Cornelius Eady and Marilyn Nelson and Martín Espada. And I think it was over 90 degrees out and Bill Murray walked across that day with us too. Anyway, Kinnell pushed me toward Seamus Heaney and Czesław Miłosz. Throw in Tomas Tranströmer and Amiri Baraka’sSOS: 1961 – 2013, and somehow eventually I’m holding Federico García Lorca, who is always near, and whose words also travel with me on trains, planes, and dreams.

When I read poetry I’ll sometimes take down several poets who may or may not be speaking clearly to one another in some tone or mood or style. It helps me hear each of them even more clearly.

Finally, I think, if there’s time, the last two things I hope to read (again) before 2016 arrives will be Rainer Maria Rilke’sLetters to a Young Poet and the letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

As I sit here looking at the bookshelves crammed with new books, I simply sigh in joy and think, too, of the stacks of books at my visual art studio nearby. This year I’m a reader for something for PEN, which means in the last months I’ve read over 50 books by writers of color, including poetry, fiction, and non fiction. Thinking just of that list alone, there are far too many books this year for me to include here. How wonderful! We’re all better for it!

So, here, quickly, are some more titles, both old and new, that changed me, whether by their grief, their beauty, their joy, their violence, their ambition, their desire, their imagination, their history, or future, but always, by their truth and courage:

With the holidays now arrived, so ends our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as all the helpful folks who assisted us in putting together such a great group of participants.Though we are undoubtedly biased, we think this series, in its simple celebration of books and reading, strikes just the right combination of joyous and thoughtful and is thus a fitting year-end valedictory.This year, we found coincidental consensus in Jonathan Lethem and Rick Moody’s praise of Padgett Powell. Likewise, both Nick Flynn and Cristina Henríquez endorsed Eula Biss. AndeveryonelovedStoner.But the considerations, reflections, and recommendations weren’t limited to recently published books, we also saw our contributors rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) weighty names like Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, and Saul Bellow.Perhaps the month’s greatest treat was the variation on offer, from the poingent squib offered by Diane Williams to Stephen Dodson’s generous recounting. Meanwhile, the eclecticism of Jesse Ball and David Shields was like a look down the rabbit hole into ever unfurling worlds of more and more and more books.If you enjoyed reading our series as much as we enjoyed putting it together (and indeed if you’ve enjoyed The Millions all year), we ask that you support the site (there are five cheap, free, and easy ways to do so on our Support page) and help us prove that smart cultural coverage is viable online.And as we enjoy the last few days of 2009, we invite all of you to take part in A Year in Reading by finishing this sentence in the comments or on your own blog: “The best book I read all year was…”

I’ve been looking forward to the publication of Molly Gloss’s wonderful Falling From Horses ever since I read the galley some months back, and this month it has finally arrived. While I waited, I returned to some of Gloss’s earlier novels – The Dazzle of Day and Wild Life, in particular. Although her more recent The Hearts of Horses was widely read, Gloss remains an author who has never gotten her full due. I have often wondered if any part of this is because she is so firmly a writer of the American West, so clearly, even when writing fantasy or science fiction, a reader of Westerns. When I read Gloss, I notice how seldom other novelists handle work — physical labor — in their books simply because she does this so routinely and so well.

She is surely one of the most thoughtful and most nuanced writers to rise from that tradition, always operating both on the level of the physical — landscape, work, the wild — but also cognizant of the mythical and problematic hold of the frontier on the American imagination. In Falling From Horses both of these are explicitly addressed — much of the novel takes place in Los Angeles during the making of the early Hollywood Westerns — and seldom has the reality and the dream been so smartly and effectively combined.

I suspect that few writers would survive the back-to-back reading of their works as well as Molly Gloss does. Her prose is meticulous, her characters distinct, her plotting unforced, her stories simultaneously iconic and completely natural in tone and incident. I usually cry at some point while reading them — that’s just an added bonus.